Orkney Days and Nights

From 1977, when it was founded, until 1990, when I stopped going to it, the St Magnus Festival in Orkney was my annual midsummer escape. Presided over by Peter Maxwell Davies and his music, it was my favourite festival of them all, set in two small towns, Kirkwall and Stromness, where one event led straight into the next, and the last of them each night led into the next day’s dawn.

It was the Scottish equivalent of Aldeburgh, Benjamin Britten’s fine little festival in Suffolk.  In both of them you encountered music evoking the landscapes and seascapes amid which you were listening  to it.  Britten’s spoke of the fens, Davies’s of luminous turquoise skies (not every year admittedly, but always hoped for) above Kirkwall harbour, filled with fishing boats each of them  identified, like Mozart masterpieces, with a “K” number.

One day, sauntering with Malcolm Rayment, music critic of The Herald, along the waterfront, we named the boats we were passing. “Look.” I exclaimed, “there’s the early opera Mitridate.”   “And there,” replied Malcolm, “is one of the best of the Salzburg divertimentos for wind and strings.”

On Sundays, prior to to an afternoon recital in the old Stromness hall, we might spot the likes of Gennadi Rozhtdestvensky walking the length of the long narrow High Street before playing piano duets with his wife, Viktoria Postnikova.  Stromness Books and Prints, formerly Broom’s Bookshop, was an essential pedestrian pit-stop, a tiny, cluttered Aladdin’s cave of a place, filled with literary treasure  trove, run by Tam MacPhail, a resident American who had once worked in Jim Haines’s and John Calder’s Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh, and who was married to Gunnie Moberg, an adventurous, poetic Swedish photographer armed with an Olympus camera, who scoured the islands for the most sensationally picturesque views, which she sometimes captured from the windows of small aircraft  that transported her around.

Near the bookshop, in his council house, lived the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown. Davies, who set many of Brown’s words, composed some of his best music in his isolated cottage near the Old Man of Hoy. Stone Litany, written for the Scottish National Orchestra and conducted by Alexander Gibson down south in Glasgow, set Davies’s inspiration flowing.

The Blind Fiddler, written for  the Fires of London, Davies’s own chamber group, was unveiled in St Magnus Cathedral. A long work, sung by Mary Thomas,  it ended just at the point where, outside, sunset was soon to become sunrise. On a solitary walk afterwards, I brooded about what I had just heard, then returned to my hotel to write about it.

The place, and its atmosphere, were magic. Each year there was a new Davies work to hear, often more than one - sometimes an opera, performed by local people, or a piano piece, portraying the voyage to Hoy, where the festival invariably ended with a merry party entailing a five-mile walk to Davies’s cottage.

Gradually things expanded. Big works replaced little ones. Isaac Stern arrived with Andre Previn to give the premiere of Davies’s Violin Concerto - not, it seemed to me, one of his greatest works.  A new music arena opened. Davies composed a frolicsome tone poem, Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, now popular around the world.  It ended with a sonorous skirl of bagpipes, even though it is fiddles, rather than pipes, which are the Orcadian instruments that matter.

The old visions began to fade.The rough-hewn voice of Ted Hughes, declaiming his poetry in the Pier Art Gallery, hangs ever more distantly in the air.  Recently Davies has been  ailing. George Mackay Brown is dead, and so are Gunnie Moberg, who died before her time, whose pictures were so redolent of Mackay Brown,  and Archie Bevan, teacher and co-founder of the festival.

Before these things befell, I had stopped attending. I had had my fill.  The festival was recognisably changing. The event as it originally was was wonderful. To venture back might be too daunting but the memory - of stormy organ music in the cathedral, of lobster and scallop suppers with Highland Park whisky after concerts, of sharing  a duck with George Mackay Brown in the Stromness Hotel (“dicey thing, duck,” he remarked as he poked at it with his knife and fork) - lingers on. This year’s St Magnus International Festival, as it is now rather grandly called, opened last Friday.
20 June 2015


www.stmagnusfestival.com